A letter from a reader

At 67, I had summer shoes and winter boots and nothing for the months in between

I have never written anything like this before, and I want to say at the start that I am not a writer and I am not in the habit of telling other women what to wear.

But three different women asked me about a pair of shoes at the school gates, where I collect my granddaughter on Fridays, and I have now explained it enough times that it seemed easier to write it all down properly.

Every year it is the same. Some grey morning in September I stand at the bottom of the stairs, look at the shoe rack, and realise the sandals are finished for the year.

And between the sandals and the boots, there is nothing.

Summer shoes with socks, which fools nobody. Big boots on a perfectly mild day. Or the old grey trainers, which are comfortable and make every single outfit look like I am on my way to a gym class I have no intention of attending. Two months of that, every autumn, for as long as I can remember.

I did not think of it as a problem worth solving. That is the part I want to be clear about. You just make do, every year, because the shops sell shoes for summer and shoes for winter and apparently nobody has thought very hard about October.

Then my sister turned up in the pink ones

My sister came for lunch at the end of last September in a pair of soft rose coloured shoes, somewhere between a trainer and a proper shoe, with a little caramel coloured sole.

She had walked from the station, which is a good twenty minutes, and came in without a word of complaint about her feet, which for my sister is unheard of.

I asked. Of course I asked. And this September, when Manchester Boutique had them back in, I ordered the sky blue pair for myself.

What I had wrong

I had always assumed comfortable shoes had to look like comfortable shoes. Grey, spongy, apologetic. The kind you wear because your feet have voted and you have given up arguing.

It turns out that is backwards.

There is nothing about comfort that requires a shoe to be ugly. It needs cushioning inside, a sole that bends where your foot bends, and hardly any weight. None of that dictates the colour. Somebody has simply decided that women our age will accept grey, and mostly we have.

The shoes are called the Veronique

They are from Manchester Boutique, a small British boutique that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now.

The shoes are called the Veronique. A soft powder blue pair with a white stripe along the side, a caramel coloured sole, and proper laces that tie, like the shoes we all grew up with. My granddaughter looked at them and said they were cool, which I am told is the highest court in the land.

Inside they are cushioned, so the pavement stops arriving quite so hard. The sole is flexible, it bends with your foot instead of arguing with it, and they weigh next to nothing, which you notice by about four in the afternoon. And the blue is soft enough to go with everything I own, but still lifts an outfit on a grey morning in a way the old trainers never once managed.

That is really all there is to it. They are not complicated. They are shoes somebody actually thought about.

What happened at the school gates

I wore them on the Friday school run, with my navy trousers and my mac.

Three women asked me about them before the bell had even gone. One of them was Norma, who has stood at those gates with me for two years and never once commented on anything I have worn.

She told me I looked ready for anything. From Norma, that is a full inspection passed.

What I noticed more than the compliments was the walk home. My granddaughter goes the long way through the park when the leaves are down, and for once I was not calculating the distance in my head. We kicked through the leaves, both of us, and my feet had no opinion about it at all.

The next morning I put them straight back on to walk to the postbox, and felt completely myself.

Three things I have learned since

One. Light changes everything. It is not the cushioning you notice first, it is the weight, or rather the lack of it. By the end of a full day on your feet, a light shoe is worth more than any amount of padding in a heavy one.

Two. The colour does real work. Sky blue sounds bold and behaves neutral. Navy, denim, grey, my beige mac, it lifts all of them. In the dark months, a soft colour on your feet does more for an outfit than anything else you can spend £32 on.

Three. Proper laces matter. They tie once in the morning and hold the shoe snug all day, and they look like shoes chosen on purpose rather than shoes surrendered to. My granddaughter approves, and she approves of nothing.

About the price

I want to be straightforward about this, because it was the thing that made me suspicious.

The Veronique is £31.95. It was £64.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because my sister's usual comfortable shoes cost twice that and look like bread rolls.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is no department store taking a cut in the middle, and this is their launch price on the new autumn stock.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and went and read the reviews before I ordered. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some websites, which if I am honest made me trust it rather more. One woman had written, “Light as anything and the blue goes with far more than I expected. I reach for them every single morning.” That was the one that decided it for me.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were walking through the park and you asked me, this is what I would say.

If every autumn you make do for two months, socks with summer shoes and boots too early, it is not that you have odd feet or odd standards. It is that nobody sells shoes for October. Well, somebody finally does, and they cost less than a supermarket shop.

Not because a pair of shoes will change your life. It will not. But there is something in taking the long way home through the leaves without doing sums about your feet that I had quietly given up on, and I would rather you did not give up on it too.

Two practical things. The sale is on at the moment, and the first autumn stock is already going. They come in the sky blue, a black and a soft rose, in UK sizes 2 to 6, and once this batch is gone it is gone before the boot weather even arrives.

The sandals are away, and I am not sorry.

Maggie